Page 26 of Slammerkin


  He let that bit of pertness go. 'There's a universal worship of beauty which the tender sex cannot escape. Did you ever see the Misses Gunning, Mary?'

  She shook her head.

  'No, of course not, you must have been a child,' he corrected himself. 'Well. They were the most famous beauties of their day, Miss Maria and Miss Susanna. Can you guess how Miss Maria died?'

  Another impatient shake.

  'Paint,' he said with grim satisfaction. 'She used a powder to make her face pale and smooth, and it poisoned her in the end.'

  Mary gave a little shudder. 'So will you be making Hetta a pair of stays?' she asked after a minute.

  He glanced at her curiously.

  'Haven't you heard her asking for them?'

  'The child's not six years old,' he murmured, pushing his long needle through the linen.

  'So, in the case of your own daughter, you admit they might do harm?'

  This girl had a dreadfully teasing manner, sometimes. Mr. Jones bit down on a smile. 'Hetta might do well enough with a little pair in canvas, kept loose. I have always discouraged my wife from lacing too tight.'

  Mary Saunders glanced down at herself. His eyes followed hers. Under her blue bodice her chest was as taut as a sapling. For fifteen, she was a full-figured woman. 'Where did you get that pair?' Mr. Jones asked professionally.

  'London.'

  'But what shop?'

  Her dark eyes clouded over. What had he said? 'A friend left them to me,' Mary answered finally, 'when she died.'

  He returned his eyes to his work. 'Its a simple set,' he said briskly, 'not much force to them, but the line is true.' His hands dithered over the white fragments of whalebone, then seized the one he wanted. 'You're not the kind of customer I like, though,' he muttered under his breath.

  'No?' asked Mary.

  'Not enough needs fixing,' he said neutrally. 'A girl like you might as well wear a sack.'

  He didn't look up, in case she was blushing.

  'So you prefer ugliness?' she asked a little hoarsely.

  'In a sense,' Mr. Jones told her. 'That set of stays I made for Mrs. Leech, for instance—now there was a challenge. You realise, Mary, I can mould the female form into whatever I like. I aim for an effect of harmonious symmetry, much like the architectural designs of Mr. Adam, I like to think.' He thought this allusion was probably wasted on the girl. 'I might go so far as to call myself a maker of women,' he explained.

  'So you improve on the work of the Maker?' she asked cheekily.

  His blade slowed as he pondered this remark. 'Continue it, rather. I use what He has provided us with to bring His creations to the height of perfection.' Mr. Jones lifted a curved slip of white bone up to his eyes for inspection. 'But I have a liking for stays themselves, quite apart from fitting them to their wearers. The intricacy of them, you know; the strength.'

  'Yes?'

  'How they hold everything in place.'

  Mary Saunders smiled. Her mouth was really too wide, her master decided. Her lips had too much blood in them. What was that old rhyme?

  Men's Tools according to their Noses grow;

  Large as their Mouths are Women too below.

  Head bent, he blushed faintly over his work.

  The manservant came in then, with a stack of boxes. He brought a faint tang of the outdoors with him; the smell of hard work in the fresh air.

  Mr. Jones glanced up just then, to ask Daffy something, and saw the manservant standing there, arms by his sides, looking at the maid, and the maid staring back at him. Mary and Daffy, the master said to himself, turning away; Daffy and Mary. Like an old rhyme.

  He heard Hetta squeal in the passage, and Mrs. Ash's stern tones, drowning her out. He waited for the quick steps that meant his wife, and her voice, soothing the child and the nurse too.

  What Mr. Jones had seen had locked his throat, and made him turn a little sick. His hand was shaking, so he laid down the blade. He felt old, and crippled. A pain started up in the leg he'd lost a quarter of a century ago.

  Nance Ash woke with a sense of weight on her hands and face. After a few seconds, she remembered that this was Easter Sunday. The Lord is risen. She waited to feel her spirits lift, but nothing happened.

  Easter was her favourite festival, as a rule. It had few of the frivolities of Christmas. It was concerned with pain, and the purposes of pain, and pain's triumph and consolation. But this morning her heart was shut up like a tomb, and the great stone was too heavy to move aside.

  On the floor below she could hear the quick steps of her mistress. A woman of whom Nance Ash would have to say that she was fond, even if Mrs. Jones had thwarted her on many occasions over the years (most recently and disgracefully in the matter of those cloth scraps), and had an unfortunate tendency to place her trust in false friends such as Mary Saunders. A kind enough mistress; better than many, no worse than some. Not noticeably godly, but not quite godless either. A woman who had come up from nothing—Back Lane, Mrs. Ash added mentally, which was worse than nothing—by means of some skill with a needle and marriage to a hardworking man. The Lord maketh poor and maketh rich. God had seen fit to place Mrs. Jones at the head of a family, secure in the love of a fine upstanding husband, for reasons best known to Himself. And Mrs. Ash He had put under this woman as a servant.

  It would never occur to Nance Ash to question His will. He had given her masters who had kept her on long after her milk dried up, out of charity. The word was a dry crust in the mouth, but then, what else had she to swallow? For the thousandth time, Nance Ash steeled herself to obey. And the Angel of the Lord said unto Hagar, Return to thy Mistress, and submit thyself under her Hands.

  All this could be borne. Worse than this could be endured. In hopes of a resurrection in the end.

  She dressed the same way as she had every day of her life. Dolling herself up for Easter would hardly impress the Risen God. On a turn of the stairs she almost ran into the Londoner and the manservant, who were standing deep in conversation. Their faces were not a foot apart. At the sight of Mrs. Ash they backed off. Guilt on the air, like dust motes catching the light.

  'Good morning, Mrs. Ash,' said Daffy, very sprightly. 'May I be the first to offer the felicitations of the day?'

  'The resurrection of our Lord is not a carnival,' she told him, brushing past. She didn't look behind her to see the girl's face; she knew just what mixture of impudence and lasciviousness it held. The cheek of her, to come into this household and set herself to distract a young man from his duties! It seemed to Mrs. Ash now that Daffy had been an excellent fellow until Mary Saunders fixed her dark eyes on him.

  Well, they had better be careful, the pair of them. She wasn't going to turn a blind eye to smuttiness in corners, whatever others did. What they were feeling—oh, Nance Ash remembered it well enough from the days of her engagement, that unholy knot of excitement in the stomach—it could bring them down like a hurricane in the end.

  For Easter dinner the Joneses were going to have hare pie, thanks to Daffy, who'd come home with two of the creatures over his shoulder. Mrs. Jones smiled to herself as she brushed egg across the pastry lid. The Lenten days were over.

  That was twice recently that Mrs. Morgan had commented on their absence from church; it was time for the whole family to make an appearance. At St. Mary's, the women sat in a row at the back of the right-hand pews, packed in like fish. Mrs. Jones had put her teeth in, for the occasion, so she was trying to remember not to smile too wide, for fear the pewter settings would catch the light of the candelabra. On her left was Mrs. Ash, down on her knees from the moment she'd entered the church, head on her hands; her mistress swallowed a wave of irritation. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her husband and Daffy, over on the men's side. Daffy was looking up at the ceiling as if something miraculous were happening among the spiders there. Her husband had his hands knotted in his lap in a perfectly orthodox fashion. No one would guess his conviction that, as he'd put it to her only the other night, the
Church of England was as corrupt as a dead dog, and not at all a suitable place for addressing the Divine.

  Mrs. Jones took a long breath and began to enjoy herself, despite the feeling of too many teeth in her mouth, eating her up. All around her she recognised clothes she'd sewn herself. She elbowed Mary when Miss Theodosia Fortune went by in that taffeta cape with the festooned hem that had caused them so much trouble. Then she craned to see past Mrs. Halfpenny, asleep in her butterfly cap, delicate snores rising. Over on the other side of the church, Mrs. Halfpenny's husband, the town clerk, had got something tucked inside his prayer book, she noticed; his lips moved as he read.

  Mrs. Jones toyed with the notion that the ladies of Monmouth were her puppets: walking advertisements for her handiwork. The vainer ones flicked their heads from side to side like pigeons, to check that no one was wearing more ruffles than themselves. With all the coloured skirts and plumed straw hats, and the old stained glass behind them, the little church was as bright as a fruit bowl. Even Cadwaladyr's vestments were as vivid as a bruise.

  The curate's sermon was on dress. 'Are the fair sex empty vessels,' intoned Cadwaladyr gloomily, 'that they must make such a fuss of their outsides?'

  Mrs. Halfpenny had woken up now. Beside her, plumes twitching in annoyance, sat the stately Mrs. Morris of Chepstow, who owed five guineas at the Joneses and God knows what elsewhere.

  'The waste of time and money on mere attire will surely reduce this nation to beggary,' complained the curate. 'Unless—' his reddened finger moved along their pews—'the ladies turn of their own will from proud vanity to sober economy.'

  There were rustles and creaks all around. 'And this from a seller of spirituous liquors!' hissed Mrs. Halfpenny.

  'The fellow is trying to ruin our trade,' murmured Mrs. Jones mischievously in Mary's ear. She'd never heard ladies rebuked to their faces before.

  But Cadwaladyr must have realised by now that he'd gone too far. Midstream, his sermon changed direction. Neatness without could signify neatness within; he went so far as to admit that the Creator was gratified by beauty in his creatures. 'But above all, what He demands is transparency of heart,' the curate went on, his voice rising: 'that His people should be what they appear to be.'

  Beside Mrs. Jones her maid sat with her jaw jutting out. She seemed to have taken against the man. What an unpredictable girl Su Rhys's daughter was. Not that Su had been entirely free from moods and megrims herself, good woman that she was.

  St. Mary's was as hot as an oven by the time the sermon was over. Under the weight of incense and pomade, Mrs. Jones registered the sweat of outrage. And another smell she didn't recognise, dark and vegetative. Only on the way out, shuffling to the back of the church behind the vast arcs of skirts and the odd dress sword, did she remember what it must be. Behind the pews the church was floored with the gravestones of the great families. In one corner the pavement had been dug up, and earth piled high, smothered in flowers and leaves. It must have been a winter burial; the greenery had rotted to the slime of February, and it all smelled rampantly alive.

  'Sometimes,' Daffy said dreamily, 'when I have a whole day off, I walk right down the Vale to the old abbey at Tintern. There's never a soul there. I like to stretch out in the long grass and count the windows. I never end up with the same number twice!'

  Mary lay with her face six inches from his, in Chippenham Meadow at eight in the evening of the mildest day of April. She could feel Daffy's hot breath on her cheek. He was one of those people who gave off a sort of cloud of heat in every direction, even through his double-layered winter jacket.

  'The sky is so blue through those old stone pillars, Mary. It looks as if a giant wandered by and lifted off the roof to see what was inside. Maybe I'll take you down to Tintern someday, in the summer?' he suggested. 'It's a long enough walk, but you're stronger than you know.'

  She nodded, not listening. Her head was propped on her fist; she glanced down at the tops of her breasts, creamy as fresh butter.

  Now he was rambling on about the crows, pointing as they wheeled from tree to tree at the darkening horizon. 'They each go off to search for food alone, at twilight,' he said eagerly, 'but then the leader calls them home. They chase each other, for sport, but they all end up asleep together in one great roost. Strength in numbers, you see.'

  Mary yawned and stretched, inched a fraction closer, as if she didn't know what she was doing. She could see the front of Daffy's breeches tautening. Power pulsed in her like water in a spring. She told herself that she could make this man stand up like an ear of wheat.

  Oh, it was delicious, this moment before the demand, before the rebuff. Because of course she would say no. She had no intention of risking her new life for a roll in the grass with Daffy Cadwaladyr.

  He'd better not try it. He'd better not take a single liberty. Mary wouldn't even need to speak, in fact; she would simply push him off her, the moment he stopped talking and climbed on top of her. Because every man came to a moment like that. Young or old, civil or boorish, they all reached a point where what was happening in their heads was rendered irrelevant by what was happening in their breeches. Even the gallantest gentleman, when he was all talked out, would take hold of a girl and crush her against him as if she were no more than a mattress. They couldn't help it; it was their low nature. It wasn't worth getting upset over. What was it Doll used to say, cackling all the while? They'd fuck a goat if they couldn't find a woman, dearie. They'd fuck a hole in the wall!

  Daffy had stopped talking, without her noticing. It was as if he'd run out of words. He did a peculiar thing, then; he reached out and touched Mary's cheekbone; lightly, as if he was brushing away a speck of coal dust. She thought of Doll, that first morning, wiping mud out of the lost child's eyes.

  Her throat hurt, all at once, as if she were swallowing a stone. She wished the two of them could stay forever frozen in this moment, hidden in the grass, as the setting sun slid across the fields of Monmouth. Before any asking, any refusal. While this strange, tame young man was still looking at her as if she were worth any price.

  It all came down to the market in the end, she reminded herself. When corn was plentiful, the price of bread would fall. Whatever a woman gave away, she cheapened. Men wanted what they couldn't afford. For all Daffy's book-learning, Mary knew he'd turn out to be the same as every other man, in the end; for all his soft talk, she knew exactly what he needed from her. A hole in the wall.

  Mary Saunders had never given anything away for free, and she wasn't about to start now. She let his hard fingertips move across her mouth, for a long second, while she gathered all her powers of refusal.

  'Marry me,' he said simply.

  She sat up so fast she scraped her elbow. The black world spun round her. 'What?'

  'Didn't you hear me?' he asked, blushing red.

  Sick with dizziness, Mary started laughing. It was all she could think to do.

  Daffy put his hand over her mouth, as if to seal it up. 'Let me speak,' he said hurriedly. 'Give me a minute. It's a very sensible plan.'

  'It's a nonsense!'

  'No,' he gabbled, 'no, listen. I'm a cautious man—'

  'You're a fool with swollen breeches!'

  He blinked at her, startled. Very well; let him know how coarse she could be. Let him realise what an impossibility he was asking.

  Daffy got up on one knee, and knotted his hands together. 'I swear,' he began, 'I swear it's not just a matter of ... amorousness. It seems to me—it has seemed to me for some time now,' he corrected himself, 'that you and I have much in common.'

  Mary let her mouth twist into a smile. Was that what he called it?

  'I mean,' he added hastily, 'we neither of us seem to have any immediate prospects of bettering ourselves, but when we consider the matter closely, we're both in a position to profit from our experience.'

  'Daffy, man, what are you talking about?'

  He cleared his throat with a donkey's bray and rushed on. 'I know you're fond of the
family, as am I, but they can't expect us to stay forever. What I mean to say is, by the end of the year I'll be ready to set up my own sign as a staymaker. And you—you're almost qualified for dressmaking, and millinery, and such, aren't you? Mrs. Jones is always saying how quick a learner you are. And so before too long it might be possible for us to...'

  'Marry?' she asked in the long silence.

  Daffy nodded so hard she thought his head might crack off. 'I'd wish,' he said, straining for the words, 'to be the kind of husband who's as much ... friend as lover. Do you understand me? What I'm offering is a—a partnership, in all things.'

  Mary's mind scurried like a rat. The man liked her, wanted her, was her match in hard work and ambition; was that such a small fortune? What had the Joneses, when they'd started out, but a mutual fondness, a few skills, and a wish to rise in the world?

  'I know you're still very young,' he rushed on, 'and if you liked we could wait. But not too long, I hope. I mean, if you say yes.'

  Mary let herself down into the grass. Her heart lurched in its cage of ribs.

  'Please,' he added. 'I meant to say, please. I've thought it all through. I've thought of nothing else. I haven't read a book in weeks!'

  That made her laugh again, in triumph. She let her eyes rest on his blue liquid ones. 'What about Gwyn?' she asked, for the pleasure of hearing the answer.

  His cheeks were dark with all the blood in them. His wig was slipping off. 'I never felt like this before,' he said simply. 'I didn't think to ever feel like this.'

  What would life be like with such a man? Nothing Mary had ever bothered to imagine, in her dreams of a glittering future. It would be a chance to shed her old self, once and for all. She would be an ordinary girl again, then an ordinary wife. This was the town all roads seemed to lead to. The ending to every story she'd ever read.

  'Maybe,' she breathed.

  'Yes?' His voice was harsh, like a soldier's in battle.

  'Maybe yes.'